The environment in the news thursday, 20 October, 2016 unep and the Executive Director in the News

Trees are 'terrific' CO2 sinks

The company is a joint venture by two paper and pulp giants, International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp., to create eucalyptus plantations in the timber belt. Conventional varieties of eucalyptus have already transformed the paper and pulp industries in tropical countries, allowing them corner the market using this fast-growing variety (Greenwire, Jan. 29).

The ArborGen genetically modified eucalyptus trees are cold-tolerant. Among other traits in their portfolio is one for altering the content of a tree bark compound called lignin. This should make the trees easier to process during biofuel refining and make them a desirable feedstock, according to ArborGen. This trait will not be tested in the current trials, although the company has applied for deregulation.

Compared to using switch grass, another popular cellulosic biofuel option, which produces about 7 to 10 tons of biomass per acre per year, hardwoods, including eucalyptus, can produce between 12 and 33 tons, said Wells.

The renewable fuel standards program of U.S. EPA requires that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels be blended into gasoline by 2022. It expects that nearly 21 billion gallons of this will come from advanced biofuels.

If at least 33 percent of these gallons comes from woody biomass, this would require about 500 million to 700 million seedlings to be planted annually starting next year for harvesting in about seven years time, said Wells at the BIO conference.

The technology for producing cellulosic biofuels is still being developed and may take years before it becomes a reality. Studies by agencies including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have shown that the water footprint of biofuels may be high in the refining and irrigation stages.
Gap in Rules on Oil Spills From Wells

The New York Times, 16 May 2010, By Kate Galbraith

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But many oil spills, almost by definition, become international events. Oil slicks can easily be carried to distant shores by the sea currents. A huge Australian oil spill last year in the Timor Sea caused angst in Indonesia and East Timor.

There has even been concern that the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico could make its way to the Atlantic Ocean, tugged along by powerful currents.

In the event of a spill that affects multiple countries, a number of global conventions devised through the International Maritime Organization govern prevention and clean-up efforts. There are also regional agreements — the United States, for example, maintains agreements with Canada, Mexico, Panama, Russia and the British Virgin Islands, according to the State Department.

But experts say there are large gaps in what the international agreements cover.

“There is a tremendous body of international law addressing oil pollution, dealing with matters including construction and seaworthiness of ships, safety of navigation, pollution response, and liability,” said Tim Stephens, a senior lecturer on the law faculty at the University of Sydney and the co-author of a forthcoming textbook on the law of the sea.

However, the international maritime conventions apply “primarily or exclusively” to accidents involving tankers — the devastating 1999 Erika spill off the coast of Brittany, France, was from a tanker, for example, he said in an e-mail message.

They do not apply to accidents involving oil platforms, like the Deepwater Horizon spill.

“It is definitely an omission,” Mr. Stephens said, adding that only “tentative” steps have been taken so far to make the maritime agency’s rules applicable to platform spills.

The regulatory discrepancy has a simple explanation: tankers move across international boundaries all the time, whereas platforms remain fixed in place. But as oil companies push their exploration farther offshore with the help of new technology, spills like Deepwater pose an increasing risk — and could galvanize new action.

A key area for exploration and production-related spills is liability.

“There is no global convention governing this issue,” said Sergei Vinogradov, a senior lecturer at the Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the University of Dundee, in Scotland.

By contrast, liability from tanker spills is covered by two 1992 conventions, one dealing with civil liability and the other with an oil-pollution compensation fund, he said in an e-mail message.

A different area in which more international coordination on spills is needed is the Arctic. That region is widely regarded as the next frontier for petroleum production. It holds perhaps 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, according to a 2008 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey, but it is also among the most fragile environments on Earth.

An international oil-spill conference next year in Portland, Oregon, is supposed to focus on Arctic issues, said Robin Rorick of the American Petroleum Institute, which is one of the conference sponsors, along with several U.S. agencies.

In the aftermath of the Deepwater spill, the conference agenda is certain to change, but Mr. Rorick said that the Arctic would remain a point of emphasis. The issue is growing more pressing as companies prepare to drill there — Shell Oil plans to drill several exploratory wells off northern Alaska this summer.

Even outside of formal agreements, international advice and assistance is often a key feature of oil-spill response.

In the Deepwater case, a number of countries — including Norway, Britain, France and Germany — have offered equipment and assistance to the United States in dealing with the spill.

And the administration of President Barack Obama plans important changes to the Minerals Management Service, the U.S. agency that regulates the offshore oil industry, somewhat along the lines of restructuring that previously took place in Australia, Britain and Norway.

The U.S. agency enforces safety and environmental requirements for oil rigs. It also collects money from oil and gas leases on U.S. government land as well as mineral-extraction royalties.

This is a conflict of interest, and the Obama administration plans to split the agency, which is part of the Department of the Interior, into two parts in order to address the problem.

As Tom Zeller Jr. reported last week in the New York Times (of which the International Herald Tribune is the global edition), Australia created a special offshore safety agency in 2005, called the National Petroleum Safety Authority, to minimize conflicts of interest. Norway created its Petroleum Safety Authority in 2004, for similar reasons.

Britain also walled off the functions of safety and revenue-collection following a deadly 1988 explosion of the Piper Alfa rig in the North Sea. It moved safety oversight from the Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive.

The United States will also undoubtedly look to other countries as it tries to understand how to strengthen safety requirements to prevent another oil spill.

One technology that could have been useful in the Deepwater case is an acoustic valve to shut off the well by remote control in an emergency.

Such devices are required by Brazil and Norway, but not by the United States, where the oil industry successfully resisted a proposal years ago to require its use, according to Oystein Noreng, who heads the petroleum studies unit at the Norwegian School of Management.

“In Norway, for more than 40 years, we have had a fairly harmonious coexistence between a large offshore oil industry and some of the world’s largest fishing industries,” Mr. Noreng said in an e-mail message.

“Nobody can say that a disaster like the one in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could not happen in Norway, but we have invested in the additional line of defense, thanks to political wisdom.”

The New York Times, 15 May 2010, By Justin Gillis

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be.

They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”

Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny.

Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.

Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.

Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.

“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”

He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.

While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.

Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.

Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.

“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”

The Globe and Mail, 17 May 2010, By Greg Keenan

The establishment of a chair in hybrid powertrain research is the first of its kind in Canada and part of a $190-million, seven-year federal endowment that will finance 19 research chairs at several universities across the country and has allowed the institutions to attract top research scientists from around the world.

“The next decade will bring dramatic changes in hybrid powertrain design and production, triggering unprecedented technology investment by the auto industry,” McMaster said in its submission to the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program.

But a growing chorus of voices from the auto industry is urging the federal and Ontario governments to be more aggressive if they want the country's largest manufacturing industry to climb to a position of leadership in the production of hybrids.

Companies need help too or Canada risks watching jobs and private investment dollars flow to other countries that are spending tens of billions of dollars to support their vehicle industries.

“Canadian companies are no longer on a level playing field,” warned the Electric Vehicle Technology Roadmap for Canada, whose steering committee consisted of several senior executives from the electric vehicle industry.

The report pointed to a $25-billion (U.S.) program that Washington has earmarked to help U.S. auto makers and their rivals doing research and development in the United States into hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles.

The Detroit Three auto makers are expected to spend more than $50-billion in this area during the next several years.

“The industry is presently underfunded in terms of the research and commercialization capital needed to produce EV components,” the Roadmap report said. “It is hard-pressed to compete with well-funded competitors in the U.S. and elsewhere. Significant financial support is required to retain this expertise and to support jobs within Canada.”

A boom in sales of plug-in hybrid and battery-powered vehicles is not expected in the next few years, but auto makers are working furiously on such new technologies to meet stringent new fuel economy rules that come into place in the United States and Canada in 2016.

They will start arriving later this year with the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that will travel about 60 kilometres on electric power and possesses a small, gasoline-powered backup engine to extend its range. Toyota Motor Corp. will test plug-in hybrids in North America this year.

Ford Motor Co. plans to have 10,000 fully electric versions of its Focus compact car on the road next year, while Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. wants to sell 500,000 Leaf battery-powered cars globally by 2012.

Ontario has already lost out on one opportunity, however. Azure Dynamics Ltd., a TSX-listed company, has chosen Michigan as the place where it will assemble battery-powered versions of Ford's Transit Connect utility.

“My heart was: Do it in Ontario,” said Mike Elwood, vice-president of marketing for Azure Dynamics and chairman of the steering committee for the Roadmap report. “Buy America and other things precluded that, unfortunately.”

The report says there should be 500,000 plug-in vehicles on Canada's roads by 2018. Given that projection, Mr. Elwood said incentives to manufacture such vehicles in Canada and to Canadian drivers to purchase are necessary as are leadership and education.

“We haven't had anybody federally step up and say: ‘Not only do we want to see 500,000 [electric vehicles] we want to see one million.' “

Governments could reward people who buy electric vehicles with non-monetary incentives, he said, such as preferred parking spots.

Magna International Inc. chairman Frank Stronach has urged the federal and Ontario governments to develop policies that will encourage assembly of electric vehicle components in Canada.

“We're in a race for two things: knowledge investment and manufacturing investment,” said one industry source.

“This is like the NBA draft. We want the A-team. What is Canada doing to draft the A-team in electric vehicles?”

The National Post, 17 May 2010

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said final rules for greenhouse-gas emissions will shield small companies from permitting requirements aimed at power plants and oil refineries. Initially, the EPA will regulate greenhouse gases from existing power plants and oil refineries that increase emissions by more than 75,000 tons per year, and from new plants that emit more than 100,000 tons per year, under rules announced last week.

Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate on Thursday would halt EPA's proposed rules under the Clean Air Act and substitute legal restrictions on greenhouse gases, Steve Schleimer, a New York-based director of energy and environmental regulation for Barclays Capital, said Friday on a conference call with reporters.
Unapologetic oil

The National Post, 15 May 2010, By Alistair Sweeny

Canada's oil sands are now the major whipping boy of European and American green groups fighting the Great Climate War.

Canada is an easy target. It's a breeze to beat up on America's little brother and the world's boy scout.

In the past few years, the mass media, perhaps whipped by President Barack Obama's call for the U.S. to end its reliance on foreign oil, has focused its spotlight increasingly on the Sands, smelling blood. Members of the new profession of "environmental journalism" have become climate-change cheerleaders, going after the Sands using their very best schoolyard taunts.

Holding their noses at the stink coming from Canada's majestically ugly strip mines, they happily dub them "the biggest environmental crime on the planet" and "the worst environmental disaster in history."

Even Canadians such as Simon Dyer of Alberta's Pembina Institute haven't been able to resist joining the fun, calling the Sands "the worst project in the world." Toronto's Environmental Defence has also chimed in, producing a report called "Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project on Earth."

"With the tar sands," says Environmental Defence, "Canada has become the world's dirty energy superpower."

Calgary journalist, Andrew Nikiforiuk, backed by the Suzuki Foundation and Greenpeace, bluntly called his book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, and Montreal writer William Marsden taunted Albertans, calling his book Stupid to the Last Drop.

So, what's going on here? Why are these enviro-journalists so obsessed by trashing the tar patch and calling it the "biggest environment crime" on the planet when there are so many more worthy offenders?

Several genuine environmental crimes come to mind, for example, Saddam Hussein's draining of the Iraqi marshes or the Soviet Union's use of the Aral Sea to grow cotton, which turned the whole region into a desert.

But the Sands pale before the new China model for growth, which builds another coal-fired power station every three days. And let's not forget the U.S. electric-power generating industry that pumps out 44 times the carbon emitted by Athabasca oil sands plants.

The single top emitter in the U.S., the Scherer plant in Juliet, Ga., spews out 25.3 million tons a year of carbon dioxide (CO2) compared with total emissions from all the Athabasca Sands of 40 million tons of relatively clean CO2, primarily from the burning of natural gas to make steam, electricity and hydrogen.

Note these enviro scribblers carefully use the word "tar" and scornfully demonize it as "dirty oil," as if it were some kind of devil's brew and not that sweet golden syrup coming from the Middle East that we lovingly refine and pump into our Priuses.

OK, granted, bitumen's a few hydrogen atoms short of sweet, but Canada's bituminous sands are not "tar sands"-- tar is a substance made from coal -- they are properly oil sands. But in the battle for ratings and journalistic standing, "tar" is a dirtier word and the Sands make better copy. Who cares about China? Blame Canada.

Yet, Canada is a fairly benign culprit, emitting a mere 1.9% of total greenhouse gas emissions (2006 data), whereas the European Union, often touted as achieving its greenhouse gas (GHG) targets, emits 13.8% despite its 196 nuclear power plants which emit no CO2. Meanwhile, China produces 21.5% and the United States 20.2%. Canada comes in at number 12 in the 2008 Environmental Performance Index, ahead of countries like Denmark at 26, Ireland at 35, the United States at 39 and Australia at 46.

According to oil-expert Daniel Yergin, Canada's oil sands represent the future of North American energy. In the next five years, production should double and the producers are counting on the U.S. market to absorb it all, says Greg Stringham, a vice-president at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

I had a talk about the potential of Sands development with Neil Camarta, vice-president of gas at Suncor, in his Calgary office.

Camarta was in charge of building the Shell Albian Sands mine from scratch, and he explained the true value of the Sands in an era of declining discoveries. "Oil sands are not the same as oil," said Camarta. "With oil drilling, the time of discovery is the best time, when pressure and flow are high. The oil sands do not act this way, and never deplete like oil wells."

Unlike most deposits in the world that have to be hunted down, the Sands are just lying there for the taking, some of them up to 140-feet thick.

All you have to do is build a giant washing machine or underground pressure cooker, pay the friendly government a royalty and promise to clean up when you leave. You don't have to explore for the oil. You know the deposits have a very long life -- Suncor, for example, has access to oil that could support its current production for 100 years.

All you have to do is steam the bitumen off the sand or melt it underground, and then thin it with solvents so it flows to your up-grader or refinery.

But many critics feel that is the problem. They say that making light synthetic crude oil from heavy bitumen costs money, up to 10 times more money than pumping sweet crude up from pools under the Saudi desert. It's so big a problem that the "unconventional" oil sands are regarded by the International Energy Agency as merely a "fallback" energy source. Some fallback.

A closer look at the facts tells a different story. To take oil from the Athabasca Sands, you don't have astronomical drilling costs -- such as BP's $100-million-plus offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico that is as deep as Mount Everest is high.

You don't have to pay the danger premium or subsidize local potentates. Canada is stable, and you could say Alberta is even more stable. After capital costs, you can extract a barrel of bitumen from the Sands today for about $35, far less than it cost back in the 1960s.

For oil companies interested in a stable business model, the Sands deliver. And that's why the world's major energy companies are getting deep into the Athabasca. Onethird of multinational giant Shell's reserves are now there. Until the 2008 downturn, institutional investors were flocking to buy a piece of the action, and all of this action made Alberta second only to China in its growth rate.

The growth will continue.

Montreal Gazette, 16 May 2010, By Chris Baltimore and Steve Gorman

HOUSTON/GALLIANO, La. - Energy giant BP on Sunday marked its first success at containing oil that is gushing unabated into the Gulf of Mexico and said it may be able to stop the flow permanently in about a week.

But reports of huge oil plumes in the Gulf — including one as large as 10 miles long, three miles wide and 300 feet thick — underscored the spill’s environmental impact as the crisis moved into its 24th day.

Crude oil has been gushing unchecked into the sea from a ruptured well about a mile under the ocean’s surface, threatening an ecological and economic calamity along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

After other attempts to contain the spill failed, BP Plc succeeded in inserting a tube into the leaking well and capturing some oil and gas.

The underwater operation involved guiding robots to insert a small tube into a 21-inch pipe, known as a riser, to funnel the oil to a ship at the surface.

“It’s working as planned and we are very slowly increasing the rate that is coming from the riser tool up to the surface,” BP senior executive vice president Kent Wells told reporters at BP’s U.S. headquarters in Houston.

“So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now,” he said.

Not all of the oil was being trapped, however. Wells said it was too early to say how much had been siphoned.

Preparations for a maneuver to inject mud into the well to stop the leak for good were ongoing and would be completed in seven to 10 days, he said.

The spill began after an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers. It threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska as the worst U.S. ecological disaster.

The success on Sunday followed a previous setback, when a cord taking the oil to the surface became entangled.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Officials have stressed the spill has had minimal impact on the shoreline and wildlife, but oil debris and tar balls were washing up on barrier islands and outlying beaches in at least a dozen places in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

“As nasty as they are, they are more manageable than a slick. They can be collected. They can be cleaned and we have crews doing that,” Coast Guard Petty Officer Luke Pinneo said, referring to the latest discovery of tar balls on Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Scientists and residents of the Gulf Coast say a greater concern is the anticipated encroachment of oil into the environmentally fragile bayous and marshes teeming with shrimp, oysters, crabs, fish, birds and other wildlife.

The New York Times and other media reported scientists had detected huge oil plumes — large columns of concentrated oil moving beneath the ocean surface — in the Gulf, indicating the leak could be worse than estimates by BP and the government.

Estimates of the rate of escaping oil range widely from the official BP figure of 5,000 barrels per day (210,000 gallons) , adopted by the government, to 100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons) per day.

BP officials said they did not have confirmation of such plumes and spokesman Andrew Gowers appeared to dismiss the reports as scientifically unlikely.

“It is my observation as a layman that oil is lighter than water and tends to go up,” Gowers told reporters.

BP is facing growing political pressure to prove it will pay for all of the costs related to the spill.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano demanded in a letter to BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward that the company make clear its commitment to “redress all of the damage that has occurred or that will occur in the future as a result of the oil spill.”

The letter was released Saturday and amid concerns about the implications of current U.S. law, which limits energy companies’ liability for lost business and local tax revenues from oil spills to $75 million.

BP spokesman David Nicholas said Sunday: “What they are requesting in the letter is absolutely consistent with all our public statements on the matter.”

President Barack Obama’s administration would like to raise the cap retroactively.

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